There are twenty-five weeks in an a typical academic year, and forty working hours in each of those weeks. That’s a thousand hours. And Steven Joyce is proposing to create an engineering graduate every two hours! I’d like to see that!

It’s a good plan. These will be necessary during the Second 5 Year Plan to build the several hundred Roads of National Significance which will bring the people boundless prosperity. Dare to think, dare to act!

Um. I don’t see what the number of hours each student does in a given year has to do with the number of graduates. It means having an additional 500 students spread across all of the engineering programmes at the universities and polytechs (10 according to the IPENZ links) that have such programmes. If you count those institutions that pretend to have engineering programmes, not just the ones that are accredited by IPENZ, then it is a small increase in numbers at each institution.

Yes, Trouble Man and Nathaniel. I also saw the DPF entry. But you see the comparison then would be to say that if it takes 1000 hours to build a house, then 10,000 houses is 10 per hour. That is an incorrect arithmetic calculation.

It takes 1000 hours per year for each student, so taking 1000 hours and dividing by 500 is simply wrong. I didn’t even want to go near the house thing.

Yes, but RJL, if it was satire, then I would have hoped it would have been clearer and I note that a lot of people have taken Danyl’s ‘calculations’ as correct. I think it illustrates just how lacking in numeracy most people are, and it’s not just New Zealanders.

But the way Danyl presented it, he was satirising Joyce’s _announcement_, NOT the estimate of a new engineer every 2 hours. That seemed to be Danyl’s calculation. Otherwise, what was the point? Self-satirising? Go back and read it again!

“There are twenty-five weeks in an a typical academic year, and forty working hours in each of those weeks.”

Like hell there are! We academics work a MINIMUM of 60 hours a week, devoted passionately to the uncovering of new knowledge and feeding the voracious thirst for knowledge exhibited by our students. And that’s a MINIMUM, I tells ya!

Why is it good? Because it points out the flaw in your post? That dividing number of units by time is a meaningless figure if you ignore system capacity?

The “proper” way would be to say (in the case of DPF’s post) “How many man hours will these houses take to build?” and then “What capacity of manhours does the New Zealand building industry have?”. It will probably show that labour are extremely optimistic about where they’re going to find a small army of qualified builders, but there’s a pretty decent pool of unemployed people who could potentially be trained to build houses, (and if the houses are standardised and pre-framed in factories the economies of scale will help)… maybe there are more policies to come…

The thing is, though, DPF, that my maths is pretty basic and I don’t make my living selling statistics to the government but the flaws in your methodology are quite obvious to me, so what’s your excuse for such a misleading rubbish post?

Nothing suprises me with this lot,as pointed somewhere else it
would take 7yrs for engineers to get properly certified for the
job,does he condense the training into 24/7 for trainees?
Still probably not enough hours,even then.
Joyce is usually full of noise and bluster,no surprises there.

“But the way Danyl presented it, he was satirising Joyce’s _announcement_, NOT the estimate of a new engineer every 2 hours. That seemed to be Danyl’s calculation. Otherwise, what was the point? Self-satirising? Go back and read it again!”

Ok but its Friday night and you can be excused for reading the comments bottom up. Fair enough. But Joyce still does have a point. For once.

If Joyce wants to spend taxpayer cash to ensure more engineering students I wish he’d invest it in stimulating the kinds of jobs they’d be willing to train for, and assisting employers to recruit them, rather than threatening to penalise educators for the heinous crime of meeting a proven existing market demand for humanities and lower-level foundation students.

And yet Peter Williams repeated a variation on Farrar’s bullshit this morning on breakfast T.V. as a criticism of Labour’s housing policy. The intellectual laziness, lack of curiosity and downright stupidity of acting as a repeater on state T.V. of a widely and immediately ridiculed piece of spin from a government propagandist defies belief. Something to remeber next time “MSM” journalists get up on their hind legs to criticise the blogsphere.

well i kinda missed it, both the satire and the “impossibility”… i just already had Joyce’s “if the University of Auckland needs me to be the highly visible hand of the market, I shall be that highly visible hand” statement already in mind so i even missed that i missed the satire.

hint: not everyone reads kiwiblog😉 i probably would if the posts were less frequent and comments were switched off…